To fully
understand the phenomenon of mysticism in Adventism, and note, not Adventism
proper but a worrisome inroad into Adventism, it is important to understand
Judaism, especially that phase of Judaism that evolved into mysticism.

There are books
on this topic that fully explains the phenomenon in minute detail. For the
beginner, get Louis Finkelstein, The Jews: Their Religion and Culture (1975)
especially volume 2. A chapter was written by Abraham J. Herschel in this volume
and it deals with the element of mysticism in Judaism. Gershom Scholem's book on Mysticism is a standard well-written work on the topic and a must for the serious investigator of this phenomenon in Jewish Cabbalism. I studied Judaism as my major under Rabbi dr. Yitzak ben Joseph at the University of South Africa way back in the 1970's.

In brief: the mystic
sees everything as a whole and wish to use words and phrases of the Bible to be
connected in some way by God so that all are related. They see chiasms over
broad sections of the Bible. They see numbers as some mysterious messages that
are “coded” by God into the Word of God. “Stirred by a yearning after the
unattainable, they want to make the distant near, the abstract concrete, to
transform the soul into a vessel for the transcendent, to grasp with the senses
what is hidden from the mind, to express in symbols what the tongue cannot
speak, what the reason cannot conceive, to experience as a reality what vaguely
dawns in intuitions. ‘Wise is he who by the power of his own contemplation
attains to the perception of the profound mysteries which cannot be expressed
in words’” (Hartman 1975, 155).

There is a
scholar in the USA that studied for his doctoral “Meditation” and who is going
around in seminars to teach people to “meditate”. It is exactly this behavior
that touches strongly on the danger of “mysticism” in religion.

There is
another Rabbi who became an Adventist or who is a very good friend with
Adventists in the Berrien Springs area and he saw presumably, so the story goes, connections in Ellen White’s
books that borders on Chiastic structures. Some of these ideas were taken
seriously by Adventist scholars like Ron du Preez who on the basis of this
rabbi who found chiasms in the Conflict of the Ages series inspired Ron to find
25 chiasms in Desire of Ages.

Ron extended
his chiasms for example: Genesis 1 is Creation; 2 is home; 3 is fall of Lucifer
jumping then to the end of the Bible and say Revelation 20 is Satan bound;
Revelation 21 is home recreated; Revelation 22 Life on earth continues again
like at Creation. And it is not just Ron.

Jon Paulien in
his What the Bible says about the Endtime 1994, lapse into mysticism
himself and this week the Sabbath School lesson cites Paulien’s idea of the
Trinity in Revelation theory. According to Paulien, the Trinity (true one of
the Father, Son and Holy Spirit) found its symbolic counterpart in the dragon,
first beast and second beast of Revelation 13. Notice that there is no
intratextual data to support this claim at all. Nowhere is it said that the
Holy Spirit wish to point out that these are the false Trinity countering the
true Trinity. It is a perception by someone who wishes to see more in the data
than the data is permitting to give.

There were two
schools of exegesis in the days of Churchfather Origen, namely the one Origen
was involved in, called the Alexandrian School of hermeneutics that constantly
saw in the words of the Bible all kinds of messages and tried to connect words
and phrases in picturesque ways that is not intratextual and then the
Antiochian School of hermeneutics that refused to do so since they worked with
the grammatical-literal approach to the Bible.

Any superimpositions,
for example numerology, which is the phenomenon of scholars or people to link
numbers in the Bible, in the Old and New Testament and then elevate a theology
around that connection, is mysticism.

Parachute
Adventism is much involved in this kind of methodology.

Paulien for example
in the same Endtime book of his on page 61 is denying that Isaiah 65:20
is referring to “heaven” and that it is just referring to the Babylonian exile.
This is the Reformed (preteristic) inroads in Adventism. Many people are
deceived by the thinking that an Adventist graduate from Andrews and a seminary
professor cannot be self-deceived in his/her perceptions. Deception is when the
professor is told of these problems but still continue to teach the off-roads
from the Scripture. My own approach is to write directly to people I evaluate
to tell them exactly what I think. Communication of corrections is part of the
Spirit’s work, even academically, to get us in line with the unchanging Word of
God.

Once someone is
building all kinds of niceties and connections as a frame or frames of theology
in the Bible that is not supported intratextually but superimposed by
intuitions and vague similarities in expression here and there, one has to do
with the danger of mysticism in Adventism.

Jacques Doukhan
was my professor and a fantastic one. Cannot forget him. Yet, as a jewish
scholar he sometimes do just that, namely, that he borrows from Judaism that
part which is invested with “mysticism” making chiasms, connections, namely,
bringing subject matter so remote from each other together as linked, just
because a similar word or phrase occurs within the subject material. His
commentary on Daniel is such a case in point, especially the explanations of
the last few verses of Daniel 11. This comment does not mean that professor
Doukhan’s books and ideas must be thrown out of the libraries of Adventism or
our own. No, he is the anointed by God, just like Paulien and Du Preez and
their life frame is anointed by God to them to function in and from where they
present their interactive ideas about God. If they are expressing themselves in
an “off-text” manner, then that issue is between them and God, the faithful
person is still to respect the scholar despite these occasional lapses into
error. If the scholar persist after shown by another scholar/scholars of these
errors, then one can begin to make public certain points that will serve as a
guide to these people.

“The Lord made
this world corresponding to the world above, and everything which is above has
its counterpart below . . . and yet they all constitute a unity”. This is a
citation from a mystical source the Zohar II 20a. It sounds so innocently
correct, but with Satan and his cronies on this earth roaming around, it is not
correct. It becomes very dangerous to the truth and to the Bible and the Word
that God has planned for us to get.

We are not to “rewrite”
the Word of God. We are to bring out what is placed in it.